Saturday, June 07, 2008

Eye Opener

by digby

Clinton has officially suspended her campaign and thrown her support to Obama. I'm sure we'll hear a lot of very nice encomiums over the next few days. The media never loves a Democrat more than immediately after he (or she) concedes.

C&L has the video of Clinton's speech. I thought it was very, very strong --- inspiring, conciliatory, intelligent and respectful of her supporters and her rival. John King and Chris Matthews insist she was "auditioning" for VP. (The implication being, naturally, that she doesn't mean a word of it unless she gets what she wants.) Carl Bernstein said that she made a good start but needs to do much, much more before anyone will believe her. Clearly, the media is going to have a hard time giving up their obsessions.

These people are asserting, without apparent irony, that if she had asserted her feminist credentials more forcefully and run "as a woman" she could have won. I don't have the energy to write much more about this right now, but I will eventually. It's been a long campaign and I tried my best to deal with the subject in real time as it became clear to me that there was something truly ugly going on with the media, even by their low standards. It wasn't the most popular thing I've ever done. (I'll never forget the reaction, that's for sure.)

Watch this and keep your lunch down if you can:

And that was far from comprehensive. Media Matters has many more examples.

I have written before that I don't believe Obama's win is attributed to this phenomenon. He won it fair and square, carrying a heavy historical burden of his own. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Acknowledging that doesn't create a "toxic legacy" and neither is it just the sad lament of "lonely people" (translation: lonely old women.) But I'm sure those memes will catch on and we'll all be told that we imagined it all. (Youtube is our new best friend.)

Clinton's campaign ripped open a hole in our culture and forced us to look inside. And what we found was a simmering cauldron of crude, sophomoric sexism and ugly misogyny that a lot of us knew existed but didn't realize was still so socially acceptable that it could be broadcast on national television and garner nary a complaint from anybody but a few internet scolds like me. It was eye-opening, to say the least.